Dong Li

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He has translated books by the American authors Victoria Chang, Forrest Gander, Eliot Weinberger; the Chinese poets SONG Lin, YE Hui, ZHU Zhu; the German-French author Anne Weber. His own debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.

At the Bogliasco Center, Dong will revise and re-envision his manuscript The Bench. It focuses on his mother’s coming-of-age stories and how she survived her own family’s negligence during great socio-political upheavals in China. This is a book of hard familial love, survival, and memory. He will also translate it himself into German and Chinese, in the hope of revising the original and drawing obscure links between American, Chinese, and German literary traditions.